Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

this is where he spent a good portion of the first twenty years of his life. How did he manage to practice yoga on the ornate Persian rug without jamming his fingertips and toes into the walls? How did he and his father both fit on the bed with a backgammon or a chessboard between them? How did so few books aligned in the hutch above the desk once seem like an entire library—books on falconry, exotic European supercars, football clubs, and all the Shakespearean plays his father loved so much? How did he study at a desk smaller than an in-room bar where he now regularly pours himself brandies? The hexagonally patterned ball wedged between the headboard and the bookcase reminds him that he even practiced his foot and knee juggling in the cramped space before his mother finally forbade all sports indoors.

The only time Ranveer remembers being conscious of the size of his room growing up was when he ran out of space for posters and found he had to rotate them regularly: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Argentina. All the different Arab clubs. When he steps the rest of the way into the room and closes the door, he remembers that the solid wooden panels were the only spaces left for the schedules, rosters, and statistics he and his father worked so hard to compile.

All of this was before being smitten with cricket. Before his mother had a stroke while working in the garden and died of pneumonia a month later in the hospital. Before he and his father stopped talking.

Ranveer sits on the edge of the bed where his father once sat at the end of almost every day—the same bed Ranveer slept in all through primary, middle, and high school, and even most of university. Each day ended with a kiss from his father and each morning began with his mother making him breakfast: warm bread spread with feta cheese and a dollop of fig jam, or a tomato and onion omelet, or a hot bowl of lentil soup. Always a glass of golden tea.

But everything changed the day the Ministry of Intelligence came to visit Ranveer. It wasn’t for several more years that he realized that they’d used predictive analytics to anticipate his aptitudes, but his father must have known right away because it changed the way he saw his son. Ranveer remembers how the family scrambled to stash their Hindu statues and shrines every time the men in gray suits knocked. When they were gone, before giving him his good-night kiss, Ranveer’s father made sure his son understood who those men were, what they represented, and that they had no regard for life—human or otherwise—and no wish for peace. He squeezed Ranveer’s arm and reminded him that he was to become a doctor or an engineer, not a thug and a murderer.

Ranveer has done a lot of difficult things in his life, but none so difficult as telling his father that he’d made up his mind. It was on a Saturday evening, and he was driving his father’s old white Mercedes diesel home from a falcon club meeting. He can remember how he gripped the wheel hard to keep his hands from shaking and the pain he felt in his stomach. Not only had Ranveer made his decision, but he’d already accepted the Ministry’s invitation, signed the papers they put in front of him one after another, and committed to reporting for training right after graduation. Ranveer’s father looked straight ahead as they drove and never asked his son why. And Ranveer never told him.

He never mentioned the document that the men in gray suits showed him on their final visit—the warrant naming everyone in his immediate and extended families except for him. His refusal to join, it was explained to him, would result in their immediate arrests, after which they would all be found guilty and sentenced under Sharia law to seventy-four lashes, which Ranveer would be made to watch. However, if he were to accept their invitation, not only would the warrant be destroyed, but Ranveer’s entire family would be allowed to continue their observance of Hinduism. The Ministry was even willing to overlook the satellite dish on the roof the family used to watch international football matches, and the occasional bottles of “Tigris wine” his uncle bought from an illegal Iraqi immigrant and shared with the family.

From that moment, Ranveer’s father never trusted him again. But it is exactly that distrust that Ranveer now needs. If you know how to use it, animosity and hostility can be powerful tools. Distrust is as lifelong and dependable as greed and self-interest. Love nowhere near as unconditional as hate. After disassembling the gas gun and fitting its components into their foam molds, Ranveer slides the case all the way back beneath the bed, fully confident that nobody will honor this room with his or her presence as long as his father is still alive.

Ranveer has always traveled lightly, but it is critical that, from now on, he use even more discretion. As he executes his next maneuver—the most complex and delicate move he has ever attempted—nothing he wishes to see again can be in his possession. That means gaining access to the last name on his list through highly unconventional methods, and arming himself with effective but invisible weapons.

The Ministry represented the end of Ranveer’s childhood and the beginning of a new life. It was there that he studied his trade; that he was given many opportunities to employ and refine it against Mossad and the General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia; that he earned enough trust that he was allowed to travel. It was also at the Ministry of Intelligence, many years later, that Ranveer came across a new series of propaganda pamphlets distributed by the Americans. Iranian firewalls had gotten good enough at blocking packets from foreign networks that the CIA had gone back to underground printing presses, and there were teams